Hi,
This is Ryan Guy, a developer of the FLIP Fluids simulator and addon. This project is maintained and further developed by a small team of two (myself and Dennis Fassbaender). I work on the project full-time and my main duties are software development, customer support, and day-to-day business. Dennis works on the project part-time and his main duties are developing multimedia, promotions, and workflow testing.
I wouldn’t say that the FLIP Fluids addon is better than the Mantaflow implementation, or something that should replace Mantaflow. FLIP Fluids and Mantaflow both have strengths and weaknesses. FLIP Fluids has features not available in Mantaflow, and Mantaflow has features that FLIP Fluids does not. For example, Mantaflow simulates both liquid and smoke fluid simulation while FLIP Fluids focuses strictly on liquid simulation effects. It’s best to choose the solution that is suitable for your needs and it is good to have options.
The FLIP Fluids project is supported through sales on the Blender Market. The Blender community has been incredibly supportive of the project and have funded the past 17 months of development since the release. Being able to work on the project full time has allowed for us to improve the addon and add features and user requests that help with workflow and production.
The Blender Institute has recently added Sebastián Barschkis to the Amsterdam team for the next 12 months to work on physics and Mantaflow fluids. Now that the Mantaflow implementation has a dedicated developer, I’m sure we’ll see some great improvements before the official 2.82 release and will continue to improve in future development. In its current state, the Mantaflow integration is still a massive improvement to the current Elbeem solution and something that a lot of Blender users are looking forward to.
The FLIP Fluids project is fully funded through sales on the Blender Market. So far, this business model has been working very well for us and I am happy with the direction that this project has taken under this business model. I am hesitant to switching business models since we already have something that works for us and our users.
I am fully committed to continue development throughout the year for 2020, and plan to continue development in 2021 as long as the project receives adequate funding through sales.
I cannot speak for the Blender Foundation on what possible issues there could be, but the main issue could be with funding the project. I would not be opposed to integrating the addon into the official Blender distribution, but this would require and amount of funding that is competitive with our current level of support as well as competitive with other software development opportunities in my home city (Vancouver, Canada).
If any one has any questions about the FLIP Fluids project, let me know and I am glad to answer!